In 1996, Japanese conservative nationalist groups, alarmed by these changes, went on a counter-offensive. Several cities and prefectures, including Osaka, Kawasaki, Saitama, and Kanagawa opened peace museums in the early 1990s that both critically depicted Japan’s role in the Asia-Pacific War and also preserved local Japanese memories of their own war losses, while Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and Nagasaki Prefectural Peace Museum incorporated new material critical of Japan’s war. This fast changing international and domestic climate soon affected museum depictions of the war. In other words, in the 1990s in Japan the war was remobilized as an ideological site of nationalist remembrance, with one side asserting the right to an American-style militarized national identity and the other continuing to insist on a pacifist interpretation of war remembrance. Finally some Japanese today believe that postwar peace and prosperity was only possible because the wartime leadership was defeated and discredited, while others argue for a more positive legacy from the war years. War remembrance soon grew more polarized over such issues as the stance of the wartime government toward its own citizens and the culpability of ordinary Japanese in mistreatment of Asians.
In the 1990s, however, many Japanese began taking a more self-critical look at their wartime past. Many older Japanese root their pacifism in personal memories of loss and suffering. Postwar public opinion in Japan has been strongly pacifist since 1945, at least until the end of the Cold War and the death of the Showa emperor led to a major reassessment of the war years. In the end, the curators capitulated, and the new annex to the museum in Virginia now displays the Enola Gay without discussing the human suffering caused by its use or the ambiguous legacy of nuclear weaponry since 1945. However, when they circulated the initial draft for comments, veterans’ groups publicly attacked these aspects of the planned exhibit as anti-American and unacceptable. Their proposal also explored the implications of having entered the nuclear age. had originally planned to locate the Enola Gay’s historic run in the context of the war that led up to that event and also depict the destruction of the city of Hiroshima and its inhabitants using artifacts borrowed from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. The curators at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.
There was little conflict over museum portrayals of World War II in either country until the huge battle over the National Air and Space Museum’s 1995 exhibit on the Enola Gay (the airplane used to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima) and a series of conservative attacks on Japanese peace museums that began in 1996.
Debate in both countries often has assumed that the important constituencies are all domestic, even though some of these museums are significant international tourist destinations. Japanese curators have struggled over whether to explain Japan’s involvement in the Asia-Pacific War as a battle of self defense or of imperial ambition, and what to say about war crimes committed in other Asian countries. In the United States, museum professionals have endured fierce battles over depictions of racial minorities, including foreigners, as well as the morality of the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
Controversy has erupted most often when the target audience was young people, both in Japan and America.
The controversies over exhibiting war have highlighted the relationship between museums and their audiences and the professional responsibilities of curators.
In both countries, curators, particularly those at public institutions, faced a sudden increase in vitriolic political criticism in the mid-1990s over how to remember the wartime past. As many scholars have noted, war remembrance is fraught with difficult issues, prominently including how to portray the motives, policies, and conduct of one’s own government during the war. Yet in recent years, many Japanese and American museum curators have suffered this fate for their exhibits on World War II. Like most people, museum professionals generally dislike being at the center of a firestorm of criticism. Exhibiting World War II in Japan and the United States